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Wednesday, January 25, 2006

In Search of the Brontës, but which ones?

From an obituary for Michael Wharton:

A mainstay of his column was the fantasy world of Stretchford, a town populated by such grotesques as the excruciatingly trendy Bishop Spacely-Trellis, who eternally exhorted his flock to jettison “outdated concepts such as God, the Saints and the Incarnation”; Jack Moron, the boorish Fleet Street drunk whose bellicose refrain was “Wake up Britain!”; an appalling tribe of Hampstead liberals, the Dutt-Paukers; and not least the ridiculous social scientist, Dr Heinz Kiosk, who would conclude his monologues by protesting: “We are all guilty!” In Wharton’s universe, everyone remembers the famous Swedo-Albanian war; the famous fifth Brontë sister, Doreen Brontë; Stretchford’s beleaguered Aztec community; and the huntin’ an’ shootin’ Ernest Hemingway’s decision to move to Britain’s most virile town, Bournemouth.

...But...

I thought Doreen was 6th.

In case you were not aware, among the many websites devoted to real actual Brontës there had been at least one which is devoted entirely to fictional ones- a site that sounds like: Brontës R Us. It is sadly no longer with us.

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